The Cowboy's Christmas Surprise

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Ray,” Miss Joan said in a warning tone, “you’re going to be the last man sitting on his butt outside my diner if you don’t stop playing games and just say what you’re trying to say.”

  Ray sighed, shaking his head. He’d thought that Holly, whom he’d always regarded as being sharp, would have already figured out what he was trying to tell her.

  “All right, all right,” he said, surrendering. “You know, you take all the fun out of things, Miss Joan.” He couldn’t resist complaining.

  In response, Miss Joan gave him a wicked little smile. “That’s not what my Harry says,” she informed him, referring to the husband she’d acquired not long ago after years of being Forever’s so-called carefree bachelorette.

  Meanwhile, Holly stood waiting to find out what it was that had her best friend so mysteriously excited.

  “All right, why are you the last man standing?” she asked, prodding him along.

  “Because everyone else in my family is dropping like flies,” he told her vaguely, playing it out as long as he could. “Except for my dad,” he threw in. “But he doesn’t really count.” Eyes all but sparkling, he looked from Miss Joan to Holly, then said, “We just had another casualty last night.”

  “Don’t see why a casualty would have you grinning from ear to ear like that,” Miss Joan observed, then ordered, “C’mon, spit it out, boy. What the devil are you talking about?”

  The twinkle in the woman’s hazel eyes, Holly noted, seemed to be at odds with the question she’d just asked and the way she’d asked it. Everyone understood that Miss Joan knew it all: was privy to every secret, knew what people were doing even before they did it at times and in general was viewed as a source of information for everything that was taking place in Forever.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know,” Ray suddenly said, looking at the older woman. He was savoring every second of this—especially if it turned out that he knew something before Miss Joan actually did.

  “I’m not saying one way or the other, I’m just saying that since you’re so all fired up about spilling these particular beans, you should spill them already—before someone decides to string you up.”

  It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a direct order, and if she actually did somehow know what he was about to tell Holly, he appreciated Miss Joan allowing him to be the one to make the announcement. After all, it did concern his family.

  Forever was a town where very little happened. They had the customary sheriff and he had appointed three deputies—including his sister, Alma—but they spent most of their time taking care of mundane things like getting cats out of trees and occasionally locking up one of several men in Forever who had trouble holding their liquor. Occasionally the men in question had imbibed too much in their singular attempts to drown out the sound of displeased wives.

  Moreover, it was a town where everyone knew everyone else’s business, so to be the first one to know something or the first one to make an announcement regarding that news was a big deal.

  “Well?” Holly coaxed, waiting. “Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to shake it out of you?” It was a threat that dated back to their childhood when they were rather equally matched on the playing field because they were both incredibly skinny.

  He grinned at her. “You and what army?” he teased. When she pretended to take a step forward, he held up his hands as if to stop her. Having played out the moment, he was finally ready to tell her what he’d come to say.

  “You know the woman who came to our ranch to work on that box of diaries and journals my dad found in our attic?”

  Holly nodded. She’d caught a glimpse or three of Samantha Monroe, the person Ray was referring to, when she’d stopped by the diner. The woman had the kind of face that looked beautiful without makeup and Holly truly envied her that. She wore very little makeup herself, but felt that if she went without any at all, she had no visible features.

  “Yes,” she answered Ray patiently. “I remember. What about her?”

  Ray grinned broadly. “Well, guess which brother just popped the question?” Ray’s soft brown eyes all but danced as he waited for her to make the logical assumption.

  For one horrifying split second, Holly’s heart sank to the bottom of her toes as she thought Ray was referring to himself. She’d seen the way he’d initially looked at this Samantha person, and even someone paying marginal attention would have seen that he’d been clearly smitten with the attractive redhead.

  And while she knew that Ray’s attraction to a woman had the sticking power of adhesive tape that had been left out in the sun for a week, there was always the silent threat hanging over her head—and her heart—that someday, some woman would come along who would knock his socks off, get her hooks into him and Ray would wind up following this woman to the ends of the earth, hopelessly in love and forever at her beck and call.

  But then she realized that the smile curving his sensual mouth was more of a smirk than an actual smile. She wasn’t exactly a leading authority on the behavior of men, but she was fairly certain that a man didn’t smirk when he was talking about finding the love of his life and preparing to marry her.

  So he wasn’t referring to himself.

  That left only—

  “Mike?” she asked, stunned as she stared at Ray. “Seriously?”

  Miguel Rodriguez Jr., known to everyone but his father as Mike, was the eldest of the brothers. Unlike Ray, Mike smiled approximately as often as a blue moon appeared. If Ray dated way too much, Mike hardly dated at all. From everything she’d seen, the eldest of the Rodriguez siblings had devoted himself to working the ranch and being not just his father’s right hand, but his left one, as well.

  She’d just assumed that the man would never marry. He was already married to the ranch.

  “Mike asked this woman to marry him?” she asked incredulously.

  She’d known all the brothers for as long as she’d known Ray, but for the most part, she knew them through Ray’s eyes and Ray’s interpretation of their actions. According to Ray, while Mike wasn’t a woman hater, he wasn’t exactly a lover of women, either. And he had no time to cultivate a relationship.

  Yet, as she recalled, whenever she did see this Samantha they were talking about, she’d been in Mike’s company.

  Well, what do you know. Miracles do happen.

  Ray’s news gave her hope.

  “Yeah.” Ray laughed at the surprised look on Holly’s face. “Knocked my boots off, too,” he admitted. “So right after Christmas—they want to get married Christmas Eve,” he added, realizing he had left that part out, “I’ll be the only single Rodriguez male walking around.” There was laughter in his eyes as he relished the image that projected.

  “Maybe that’s because the girls in Forever have the good sense to know that as a husband, you’d wind up being a lot more work for them than most men,” Miss Joan quipped.

  “No, it’s because I’ve got the good sense never to get married,” Ray told Miss Joan, contradicting the diner owner. He leaned his head on his upturned palm as he glanced toward one of the tables where four female customers around his age were seated, eating their breakfasts in between snippets of the conversation they were engaged in. He sighed in deep appreciation as he looked at the women. “There’re just too many beautiful flowers out there for me to pick to be confined to just a garden on my own property.”

  “So now you’re a gardener?” Miss Joan asked, rolling her eyes. “Lord help us all.”

  She glanced over toward Holly for a moment, her look speaking volumes. But she said nothing further out loud before leaving to wait on the sheriff, who had just walked in.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” Miss Joan said, greeting him as she automatically applied a towel to the counter and wiped down an already clean area. “Have you heard the news?” She didn’t bother waiting
for him to respond or even make a guess. “The last of the eligible Rodriguez boys is getting hitched.”

  Sheriff Rick Santiago’s expressive eyebrows drew together in a look of confusion. Alma, in between stifled groans as she lowered her very pregnant body onto her chair, had told him the news about her brother this morning. But this little detail that Miss Joan had just sprung on him hadn’t been mentioned.

  “The last?” Rick echoed. “I thought Ray was still unattached.”

  Miss Joan smiled complacently. “I said eligible, Sheriff,” the woman pointed out. “That implies a good catch. Ray there—” she nodded in Ray’s direction “—is the kind you catch and then release after you realize that there’s no way he’s going to be a good fit for that kind of a position.”

  Ray turned around on his stool to face the older woman. He looked more amused than annoyed as he asked, “Are you saying I’m not the marrying kind? Or the kind no one wants to marry?”

  Miss Joan looked at him for a long moment, her expression completely unreadable, before she finally said, “Well, boy, I guess you’re the only one who really knows the answer to that one, aren’t you?”

  Taking out a number of singles, Ray left them on the counter as he slid off his stool. The wrapped-up, partially consumed jelly donut was in his hand. “Good thing I love you, Miss Joan,” he said to the woman as he walked passed her. “Because you sure have a way of knocking down a man’s ego.”

  Miss Joan shook her head, a knowing smile on her lips. “You’re not a man yet, Ray. Come back and talk to me when you are,” she concluded with a smart, sassy nod of her head.

  “And you,” she said in a low, throaty whisper as she walked by Holly. “Stop looking at him as if he was the cutest little kitten in the whole world and you were going to just die if you couldn’t hold him in your arms and call him your own. You want him, missy? Go out and get him!” Miss Joan ordered the girl who’d been in her employ for the past five years.

  Holly’s eyes darted around to see if anyone within the immediate area had overheard Miss Joan’s succinct, albeit embarrassing romance advice.

  To her undying relief, apparently no one had. And the person who actually counted in all this was on his way to the front door—to run whatever errands he had for his father and to shoot the breeze with every pretty girl and woman who crossed his path.

  Holly had no idea she was sighing until Miss Joan looked at her from across the diner. While she didn’t think she was possibly loud enough to be heard the length of the diner, she did know that Miss Joan had the ability to intuit things and read between the lines, no matter how tightly drawn those lines might be.

  She also knew that she owed a huge debt of gratitude to the woman. Miss Joan had offered her a job out of the blue just when she’d needed it the most and would have given her a roof over her head if she’d needed that, as well.

  It was Miss Joan who had taken an interest in her and encouraged her to take some courses online, following up on her dream to become a nurse, specifically, an E.R. nurse, when her dreams of going to college to pursue that career had crumbled. It was Miss Joan who’d had faith in her when she had lost all of it herself. And Miss Joan had come through without a word of criticism or complaint when Holly suddenly found herself a mother—without the excitement of having gone the usual route to get to that state.

  She flashed a smile at the woman now, tucked away her starry-eyed look and got back to work. Miss Joan wasn’t paying her to daydream.

  Chapter Two

  “C’mon, Holly, say yes,” Laurie Hodges, one of Miss Joan’s part-time waitresses, coaxed as she followed Holly around the diner.

  The latter was clearing away glasses and dishes bearing the remnants of customers’ lunches.

  Every so often Laurie would pick up a dish, too, and pile it onto her tray. But the twenty-four-year-old’s mind wasn’t on her work, it was on convincing her friend to do something else besides work.

  “You never have any fun,” Laurie complained, lowering her voice so that those who were still in the diner wouldn’t overhear. Bending slightly so as to get a better look at Holly’s face, she continued trying to chip away at Holly’s resolve. “You want to look back twenty years from now, sitting alone in your house, watching shadows swallow each other up on the wall and lamenting that you never devoted any time to creating memories to look back on? For pity’s sake, Holly, all you ever do is work.” Laurie said it in an accusing voice, emphasizing the last part as if it was a curse word.

  Well, she certainly couldn’t argue with that, Holly thought. But there was a very good reason for that. “That’s because that’s all there is.”

  At least, that was all there was in her world.

  There was her job as a full-time waitress, and when her shift was over and Miss Joan didn’t need her for any extra work, she went home, where an entirely different kind of work was waiting for her. The work that every woman did when she had a family and a home to look after.

  In her case, she looked after her mother, whose range of activities was limited by her condition and the wheelchair that had all but kept her prisoner these past few years. She also took care of her niece, Molly, who at four, going all too quickly on five, was a handful and a half to keep up with.

  Then, of course, there was the house, which didn’t clean itself. And when all that was taken care of, she had the courses she was taking online. Granted, they were strategically arranged around her limited time, but they were still there, waiting for her to dive into and work through them.

  All in all, that usually comprised a twenty-three-and-a-half-hour day.

  That left a minimum of time to be used for such frivolous things like eating and sleeping, both of which she did on a very limited basis.

  And that, in turn, left absolutely no time for things such as going out with friends and just doing nothing—or, as Laurie was proposing, going dancing at Murphy’s.

  “That is not all there is,” Laurie argued with her. “My God, Holly, make some time for yourself before you’re a shriveled up old prune living with nothing but a bunch of regrets.”

  Laurie caught Holly’s arm to corner her attention when it seemed as if her words were just bouncing off Holly’s head, unheard, unheeded. Holly was easygoing, but she didn’t like being backed into a corner physically or verbally.

  She raised her eyes. The deadly serious look in them caused Laurie to drop her hand. But she didn’t stop talking.

  “They’re going to have an actual band that’s going to be playing Friday night. One of the Murphy brothers and a couple of his friends,” she elaborated. “Liam, I think.” Laurie took a guess at which brother was playing. “Or maybe it’s Finn. I just know it’s not Brett.” Brett was the eldest and ran the place. All three lived above the family-owned saloon. “But anyway, it doesn’t matter which of the Murphy brothers it is, the point is that there’s going to be live people playing music for the rest of us to dance to.”

  “Might be interesting if they were having dead people playing music,” Miss Joan commented, coming up behind the two young women.

  Rather than looking flustered and rushing away, pretending to look busy, Laurie brazenly appealed to the diner owner to back her up.

  “Tell her, Miss Joan,” Laurie entreated. “Tell this pig-headed woman that she only gets one chance at being young.”

  “Unlike the many chances I give you to actually act like a waitress,” Miss Joan said, her eyes narrowing as she gave the fast-talking Laurie a scrutinizing look. “Don’t you have sugar dispensers to fill?” It was a rhetorical question. One that had Laurie instantly backing away and running off to comply.

  Once the other waitress had hurried away, Miss Joan turned her attention back to Holly. “She’s right, you know,” Miss Joan said, lowering her voice. “I hate to admit it, all things considered, but Laurie is right. Yo
u do only have one chance to be young. You can act like a fool kid in your sixties, like some of those pea-brained wranglers who come here to eat, but you and I know that the only right time to behave that way is when you are young. Like now,” she told Holly pointedly. “Did Laurie have anything specific in mind? Or was she just rambling on the way she usually does? If that girl had a real thought in her head, it would die of loneliness,” she declared, shaking her head.

  “She had something specific in mind,” Holly reluctantly told her.

  Holly braced herself. She could already see whose side Miss Joan was on. She loved and respected the redheaded woman and she didn’t want to be at odds with her, but she really had no time to waste on something as trivial as dancing, which she didn’t do very well anyway. She just wished the whole subject would just fade away.

  Miss Joan waited a second but Holly didn’t say anything more. “Are you going to give me details, or am I supposed to guess what that ‘specific’ thing is?” Miss Joan asked.

  Unable to pile any more dishes onto the tray, Holly hefted it and started across the diner. With Miss Joan eyeing every step she took, Holly had no choice but to tell her what she wanted to know.

  Reluctantly, she recited the details Miss Joan asked for.

  “There’s a band playing at Murphy’s this Friday. Laurie and some of her friends are planning to go there around nine to check it out. And to dance,” she added.

  Miss Joan nodded, taking it all in. “So why aren’t you going?” she asked.

  Holly shrugged carelessly. “I’ve got too much to do.”

  “Why aren’t you going?” Miss Joan repeated, as if the excuse she’d just given the diner owner wasn’t nearly good enough to be taken seriously. Before Holly could answer, the woman went on to recite all the reasons why she should go. “It’s after your shift. I’m sure that your mother is capable enough to babysit Molly, especially since it’ll be past your niece’s bedtime—and if for some reason your mother can’t, then honey, I certainly can.”